


and into plowshares (the homecoming remix)

by i_claudia



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ancient Greece & Rome, Changing Tenses, Coping, Loss, M/M, Past Character Death, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-04 22:58:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_claudia/pseuds/i_claudia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur has been gone a long time, but even now, at the edge of the land he used to rule, he isn't really coming home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and into plowshares (the homecoming remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glim/gifts).
  * Inspired by [with fire & sword](https://archiveofourown.org/works/311257) by [glim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glim/pseuds/glim). 



> Glim has long been one of my favorite Merlin writers, and has written so many gorgeous fics, but [with fire & sword](http://archiveofourown.org/works/311257) hit me directly in the feels; I couldn't resist. Glim, it was so much fun to remix this, I hope you enjoy it! ♥

He stands at the edge of the water, staring into the gathering mist and wondering how he could have forgotten such a terrible and inflexible barrier existed.

He has travelled a long way, has been trudging down roads and rocky paths for more months than he cares to count. It feels as if he has always been moving, as if he has nearly lost the sense of what it means to stand still in one place. He had begun walking faster in the last days, as he saw the hills and forests change, and knew he was drawing closer to the end, but he had forgotten the sea.

There will be a boat, he knows; it is only a question of which direction he should begin to look. He pulls his cloak more firmly around his shoulders, for the wind is bitter, and resettles his sarcina until his shoulder no longer pains him. He will look north, first, and if he does not find a crossing within three days he will turn to the south, and hope the gods will smile upon an old man returning home. 

He is not very old, not along the scale of men, but he feels it now, turning so that his left shoulder is to the water and tucking his chin down against his chest. It has been a long time since he's seen these shores—a lifetime—and the wind bites into him with a viciousness he'd never felt as a younger man. His skin then had been filled with anger and pride; they had burned hard within his breast and kept him warm. Now there are only ashes of that fury, its fires burnt out long ago, and though the pride remains it has settled, any warmth it might once have given now gone cold. He is too tired, he thinks, too far weighted down by the path the gods have given him.

The morning warms as it turns to afternoon, and he is just beginning to think of his stomach when he finds the legionaries. He sees them long before they notice him, and while his first thought is to step further into the trees and wait for them to pass, their armour is light and they carry nothing more than their weapons and a loculus apiece: a patrol of some sort, perhaps. They will know where he might find a crossing, and he waits, tense, for them to approach.

There is some confusion at first, and he is forced to lay a hand upon his own gladius to hold his ground, but in the end they do not give him much trouble. This region, he knows, has been quiet for as long as some of them have been alive, and he carries his proof of citizenship safe inside his loculus. The imperial seal, even this far from Rome, where the emperor seems barely a distant thought, still holds him safe, inviolable. 

“Gaius Claudius Regulus,” the leader of the patrol says, thoughtful. He is a decarius, Arthur thinks; at least, he bears the markings of the rank. “As the old emperor? You are not a native Roman.”

“I prefer Arcturus,” he corrects, neatly sidestepping the implied question. It is not quite a lie. Even the name Arcturus, which he had accepted with honour, feels like a mask obscuring his true self, but Arthur is a name he will never give to any man: Arthur is a secret, carried deep within his breast. “I served the emperor for many years.” He knows they have been eyeing his sarcina with some concern; it is the pack of a soldier, out of place here on a wandering traveller. Let them, then, believe that a simple legionary is all he has been.

“Where are you going, Arcturus?” one of the younger legionaries asks him, and he twists his mouth into a smile. 

“Home,” he says simply. “Though I need a boat to get there, it seems.”

“Well then,” the decarius says. “It's a good thing you ran into us; there's to be a crossing in two days. You still have your old mess pot? Good. The least we can do is offer a fellow soldier something to eat, and a place to sleep out of the wind. You'll stay with us.”

They set out at a brisk march, and though Arthur has ten years on the oldest of them, he finds no difficulty keeping pace. It is evening by the time they reach the humble post, and he accepts their food with quiet thanks before retiring, setting out his bedroll as the legionaries move quietly about the small enclosure.

He keeps a coin hidden within his loculus, and he draws it out now to hold, slipping it back and forth between his knuckles as he toys with it. It is heavy and warm between his fingers, and he does not bother to pull it out from beneath his cloak to look at. He has no need to see it: the tips of his fingers read every bump and ridge in it without effort. On one side, beneath the inscription, is the wreathed head of an emperor; on the other, a dragon rampant. With such a coin he might buy anything he liked, but he has other plans for it, other uses, and he keeps it hidden until he can resist no longer and must pull it from its secret pocket to hold it safe within his hand. 

It is an uncomfortable night. Not because the ground is hard and the air cold—he hardly notices the physical discomfort, having lived with it so long. But the noises of the woods well up to startle him into some long-forgotten memory: memories of a distant time, a time the skin of his wrists still remembers from where the ropes had bit in deep and left their mark. They had only bound him at night, and that had been only because of the dreams. He was too proud to run, and knew too well the consequences, but the dreams were impossible to bear, though he had tried. 

They had begun the night he left his people, the night he had bid his wife and son and everything he knew goodbye and allowed the Romans to lead him away like a pig bought at market. There had been a great dragon in the dream, covered in armoured scales and terrifying, which swooped to burn the forests of his home; a dragon he fought in his sleep, uselessly, until the legionaries bound him to a post to keep him from rolling into the fire. The dragon travelled with him, setting the trees ablaze night after night, but the dream changed as the days turned into months—or perhaps it was that the horror receded and he had clearer eyes to see that the dragon, in fact, left the great trees untouched. It was the mast which burned, all the cluttered bracken gathered beneath the branches. The dreams lost their terror, then, and became a maddening sort of comfort, an omen he dared not ignore though he had no idea what it meant. 

He had been in Rome three months when the dream changed: the dragon now circled not over a forest but a great city, one which Arthur had never seen, before it turned to fly directly at him, claws extended as it dropped swiftly as an eagle into his cell and seared him to the bone with flames. He would not have put much store in the change—whether or not he was roasted by a dragon, he was still a slave, an animal wrapped in chains to be trotted out at its owner's pleasure, and though he had always known where he would end, the bitter truth of it still rankled—but this dragon had a human face. Night after night it dove at him, flames peeling the flesh from his bones, and night after night he lay unmoving and stared it in the eyes as long as he could bear. 

He believed in dreams, knew the gods had given dreams great power, that they used dreams as their instrument to torment or to comfort mortal men, but for a long time he could not have said what this dream was meant to say. He followed it, nonetheless, and took the dragon as his shield, hoping that by claiming it so publicly during the day, he might somehow bring clarity to his nights. It soothed him to look down and see the dragon as his protector in the arena, but the face troubled him. He caught glimpses of it even when he was awake, among the crowds of the amphitheatre and in the ranks of the other gladiators. He searched for it, scanned the faces of every man he met for some scrap of recognition, however flimsy, and never found it, not until he had been fighting under Polyxenes for half a year.

He can't remember, now, where he had seen the portrait. On some triumphal wall, perhaps, crudely painted but unmistakeable. It had struck him to the core, blinded him as if he had looked at the sun after being kept in darkness, as if his very eyelids had been cut off. _Marcus Claudius Marcellus_ , he repeated to himself when there was no one around to hear. The son of the emperor; the face of the dragon in his dreams.

*

“Arcturus,” says the decarius the next evening, as the legionaries spread themselves into more comfortable positions after the meal. “You say you served the emperor; did you ever meet him?”

Arthur does not flinch; he is far too well trained for that. The legionaries are lonely men far from home, and he knows they are only eager to hear new stories, now that their own have become so well worn. “I saw the old emperor only once, just before he died. He was—” Arthur pauses. “I think he must have been an impressive man, once; he held himself as great men do, but he was much diminished by his illness when I saw him. His voice, though! His voice had a power and a music to it, even weakened by age.” He remembers more than that, of course—remembers the kindness in the old man's eyes, and the feel of the wooden sword in his damp palms—but he chooses to leave those details out of the telling.

“He was a good man, my grandfather said,” one of the younger legionaries comments. “A good emperor, too; Rome flourished under him.”

The decarius snorts. “Everyone says that after an emperor dies. They'll say it now about Marcellus, and they'll say it again after the new one dies, even if he's mad.”

“Come now,” the legionary seated to Arcturus's left admonishes. He's an older man, his face scarred from battle and from pox. “Marcellus _was_ a good emperor, better than his father, some say.”

“A good emperor, perhaps. Hardly a good man.”

That sets all of them laughing, and the jokes begin to flow before Arthur can excuse himself.

“His sister was a better man than him!”

“She probably took him from behind every night, to prove it.”

It's nothing unfamiliar to Arthur; he's heard all these tired jabs before, in every variation. He wishes, for a moment, that he had not left his armour in Rome, that he could reach for the gladius wrapped in his bedroll or the dagger hidden flat against his thigh and bring these men to shame, but he is used to resisting that instinct and greeting such words with coldness.

He had needed that cold calculation, when he began serving Merlin officially. Merlin had been so young when they met, so untouched by the evils in the world, and Arthur had loved him for it, loved that if he could not find Merlin where the emperor was _supposed_ to be—at the Senate, or in the temple, perhaps—he had only to step into the imperial library and Merlin would be there, in some cool and quiet corner, having quite forgotten the rest of the world existed.

Arthur shakes the memory off, to find the conversation has shifted to more bloodthirsty subjects. 

“Nothing ever happens,” one legionary complains. Arthur sizes him up with a look, can tell his story with a glance: young, perhaps the youngest of them, with spots on his face and soft fuzz along his jaw. His kit is clean, worn-in only from daily training and not from battle, and his eyes burn with the passions of the unblooded. “We're more likely to die from boredom and old age than the sword.”

“Have you watched a friend be killed in battle?” Arthur asks, and though his voice is frigid he is careful to keep his face polite, neutral. “Perhaps then you would not be so hasty to wish for the sword.”

He does not ask, _have you killed that friend, thrust your sword deep and through his heart_ , because it would not be appropriate. He has, though. He has killed a man—many men—for one man, for the emperor, for Merlin. He's killed men he knew, men he'd fought with and against in the arena, even men he had commanded in the Praetorian Guard; killed them without hesitation or restraint, because Merlin was greater than any of them. Merlin was greater than the breath and the spirit in his own body, and though men came looking to kill the childless emperor, the fate that met them all was swift and merciless. Arthur had never been a man to suffer fools, and in his opinion there was no man more foolish than one who thought he could kill a man chosen by the gods to rule.

He had once tried to teach Merlin how to properly manage a dagger, which he could carry on his person, but Merlin had been rubbish at it. A sword he could wield with relative ease, having been trained since his boyhood to command the legions if the need arose, but the dagger he could not—would not—learn. 

“Arthur,” he had said, in fond exasperation. “No one is coming to assassinate me.”

“They have before,” Arthur had pointed out, but he allowed Merlin to pull him down to sit beneath an olive tree.

“Once!” Merlin cried. “And a pretty poor attempt it was, too.”

Arthur did not bother to correct him. The attempt had failed, anyway, and he was satisfied with the improvements he had made to the Guard after it; there was no real need to worry Merlin.

Merlin held his breath for a moment, and Arthur stilled, waiting for the magic he could not see, waiting until Merlin breathed out again and turned to smile at him, pressing his knee against Arthur's freely. They were careful about their time together, did not risk themselves unduly, but their one great advantage over all the world was that Merlin could hide them so completely in plain sight. “What do I need a dagger for,” Merlin asked, “if I have you?”

“It's still not a bad idea,” Arthur said, mostly for the sake of argument, as Merlin took his hand. 

Merlin scoffed, and Arthur helped him remove his toga, spreading it on the ground so that Merlin could lie down comfortably, his head pillowed on Arthur's thighs. Arthur ran his hand through Merlin's hair, tangling his fingers in it.

“You worry too much,” Merlin said, lazily.

“I don't,” said Arthur, but he said it quietly, because it was summer, and they were not in Rome, and there was nothing more pressing to do but idle in the shade and enjoy each other's company. 

Merlin had been a peaceful man, but not an easy one; he had fought on more than one occasion with the Senate as he began his rule, until he had established his authority. Arthur remembers still the fights Merlin had occasionally had with Morgana, the ones where neither of them screamed or threw things and yet still managed to frighten even Arthur from the room. Merlin had been a man who loved above all else, for whom family had meant more than the empire itself; Arthur remembers how tender he was with Morgana the night news came that Lucius had been killed, how he let her shake apart with grief in his arms. Yet he remembers, too, the deadly calm with which Merlin had greeted every push for him to choose another husband for her; remembers how willing Merlin was to threaten violence for those who at first refused to accept her wishes to remain a widow in her brother's house. There would always be rumours about Merlin, and Merlin and Morgana, and Merlin's supposedly unmanly distaste for violence, but, Arthur knows, it hadn't ever bothered Merlin half as much as it bothered him.

He has allowed the conversation to go on around him without even the appearance of listening to it, but when the legionaries begin to drift away, he rouses himself and finds his own bedroll, the decarius promising a fair crossing the next day. His mind, when he lays down, is full of Merlin still, and Merlin's face crosses back and forth between his dreams and his waking. He remembers—or perhaps it is a dream, perhaps all of it is a dream—the first time he had seen Merlin's face: just a flash, the first time Merlin had visited him in the gladiators' barracks, pretending to be the humble son of a senator. Merlin's disguise had been complete, but he had let his magic slip for one brief moment, enough to make Arthur pause, unsure. He had been ready to dismiss Merlin, to vent fury and bile at him until Merlin left and never returned, but Merlin had asked, “And who are you? Your name... the one you grew up with,” his eyes wide and his voice soft, and Arthur had hesitated. Had given his true name, the name he guarded jealously as a private reminder of his real self, and afterwards he could not have said why. 

Arthur dreams, there on the uneven ground far from Rome, of another summer. 

Every summer had been welcome, but this one had been peerless, full of an unmarred handful of perfect nights they had snatched from the world. Arthur dreams of Merlin in the sun, bare shouldered, his cheeks golden as he laughs, tossing little Claudia into the air. He dreams of Marcus and Lucullus running, still young enough to be underfoot all the time but old enough now that when they tackle Merlin he goes down hard into the dirt as Morgana watches in approval. He dreams of their strange family, a family they had wrestled into being for themselves and guarded against every insidious attack.

Arthur was not related to them by blood, unless the blood he spilt on their behalf tied him to them on some dark, irrevocable level. To any onlooker he would have seemed nothing more than a stone-faced guard, shadowing Merlin's every move not because it gave him joy but because it was his duty to watch Merlin, to put his own body between the emperor and every danger. It was his duty, to be sure, but Arthur would have done it anyway. He had lost one family, one tribe already—he could not have borne the loss of another. And he was glad to be in Merlin's presence, to be so constantly close to Merlin that he might reach out and touch him if he wished, though he did not dare.

He had refused to see Merlin only once, when he had no more than the beginnings of an inkling that Merlin would forever alter him. When Merlin had asked, he had given his name, and he did not know why. The knowledge frightened him. He was not a man inclined to fear, but Merlin had terrified him profoundly, before he ever saw Merlin's true face and understood how fully Merlin would become his life. His focus had already begun to shift, even then; his thoughts in the arena, when he had the time for them, were no longer of his people, but of this strange boy who would not leave, who went weeks without a visit and then turned up, as if he were some spirit sent by the gods to trouble him.

Arthur turns to his side, shifting out of the bitter half-dream, and puts a hand over his face, pressing his fingers hard against his eyes. The nights are long and lonely now, and have been so since he left Rome, the hours dragging slower than a debate in the Senate where before they had always flown too quickly. His chest aches, and his shoulder, old wounds twinging in the damp midnight. The sounds are just as jarringly familiar as they had been the evening before, and the quiet noises of the forest send a bitter prickling down his spine, uneasy. It takes him a long time to find sleep, and even then it's only a halfway sort of sleep, restless, filled more with memories than with dreams. 

On quiet nights, nights that Arthur had spent hidden within Merlin's rooms, Merlin had asked him about his old country, and Arthur had told him, running his fingers along the soft skin of Merlin's nape. He had spoken as he remembered it, a Britannia full of magic: tree sprites which would do you harm as easily as good, springs where water bubbled cleanly over rocks and the deer came daintily to drink; the long winters, when darkness crept in around the eaves and wolves slunk on their bellies, howling at the stars between the trees. He spoke of his village, families clustered together beneath his father, a man who commanded obedience with the lifting of an eyebrow. 

Often he stopped there, discomfited. Lying next to Merlin in a sprawling bed with Merlin's head pillowed on his naked chest, his old life seemed nothing more than a dream, a fading fantasy he had once believed. Sometimes Merlin would let him leave the story there, and turn easily to other subjects; sometimes Merlin remained quiet, while Arthur struggled over the words he needed to continue, until he found a phrase in Latin which came anywhere close to describing the crown of ivy his wife had worn for their handfasting, or the sound of his son's laughter—the boy he had left in order to save, a boy as strong as Lucullus but not so crafty: an honest, happy child. 

“I would like to see it,” Merlin had said one night as dawn drew near, turning on an elbow to look Arthur in the face and tracing one gentle finger along his nose. “I feel as if I can see it, almost, or hear it in my dreams, but I would like to see your home, just once.”

Arthur had caught at his hand. “It is my patria,” he said, linking their fingers together. “It will always be. But it is no longer my home.”

Merlin had stopped at that, inhaling sharply. “Arthur,” he said, low and urgent, and Arthur sat up, the bedclothes pooling around his waist.

“This is my home,” he said, reaching to grip Merlin's other wrist with his free hand, and Merlin surged forward to kiss him, pressing their lips and bodies together until Arthur gave way gladly, gave in, allowed Merlin to fill his every sense completely. The first cool light of morning had reached in to run over Merlin's shoulders, and Arthur would be late if he did not leave soon, but how could that bother him? How was any of the world important, when Merlin's skin was hot and close against his, when Merlin whispered mad things in his ear before leaning down to kiss him again, and again, until Arthur had no breath left to call his own?

“Merlin,” Arthur gasped, a prayer as full sunrise gilded the far corners of the room and Merlin took Arthur's cock to the hilt, throwing his head back with a groan. “Merlin, Merlin—”

“Tell me,” Merlin said, bracing his hands by Arthur's shoulders and staring down at him, his hair hanging in his face. He moved his hips in small, tight circles, and groaned again, more softly, biting his lip. “Arthur, tell me.”

“Home,” Arthur said, his feet pressed hard and slipping against the bed as he searched for purchase, finding none. “You—you are my home, Merlin, the only home I have.”

“ _Arthur_ ,” Merlin said, broken, and they spoke no more, except in the conversation of two bodies moving quick and close together, striving toward that unbearable conclusion which requires no exchange of words and is all the more powerful for it.

They did not speak of it much, after; there was no need. Arthur did not forget it, though, for a dizziness gripped him when he looked at Merlin. His whole life, it seemed, had been burnt black except for Merlin, the ashes of it faded and blown away before Merlin's presence, like the scorching heat of dragonflame might clear a forest.

*

Arthur is woken by the hand of the youngest legionary on his shoulder, startled from sleep as he reaches for his gladius.

“Easy, grandfather,” the legionary says, and Arthur releases the crushing grip he has on the young man's shoulder.

“You should be careful when you wake an old fighting man,” Arthur says, his voice creaky from restless sleep. “That's an excellent way to lose your head.”

The legionary flashes him a cocky smile. “Would it have been better to poke you with a stick?”

“Cheeky,” Arthur grumbles, but he stretches and sits up. Dawn is just barely come, the light still clean and grey on the walls of the post under a cloudy sky.

“The ferryman leaves just after sunrise,” the legionary tells him. “It's not far, but if he leaves you it'll be another week of waiting.”

His leave-taking is brief, and before the sun is fully risen above the trees he is on the water in a narrow boat, the ferryman a grim presence beside him. He is tucked securely among supplies destined for the legionaries in Britannia, protected some from the spray when water laps over the top of the boat, and he takes advantage of the quiet moment to pull the coin from his loculus and hold it tightly. The weather is tipping toward foul, the wind blowing up, and he clutches the coin until it digs uncomfortably into his palm. He had almost forgotten this, the sea—almost—but it comes back now in a rush, his first terrible voyage. Merlin had asked him about it, at the last, asked him for the story.

The doctors had all come and gone, the senators had paid their last respects. Arthur had been keeping vigil with Morgana, watching as Merlin came in and out of fevers, allowing Morgana to crush the bones of his hand when Merlin spoke aloud, unseeing, to their dead parents. The hallucinations had abated at the end; Merlin had appeared to recover some, but Morgana had put a hand to her mouth and fled the room, her grey hair still perfectly in place but her back bowed, and they had known. 

Merlin had watched his sister leave with something akin to sadness, and had reached for Arthur's hand, but he only asked—in a whisper, for he himself was barely able to sound the words—if Arthur might tell him about his country. Arthur had bent down, and kissed him tenderly, and had obliged. He had talked about the hills and the deep, dangerous green of the woods, the beasts which lurked within. He had wiped the sweat from Merlin's forehead and told him that he would have liked for Merlin to meet his father, his wife and son; how Merlin would have grappled with their tongue but would have conquered it, in the end, and loved it while doing so. He had pulled fresh blankets around Merlin's shoulders when he shivered, and talked about the smells of the forest, the warmth of it, the bitter cold in winter when the snow built up around the trees. He had spoken of the crossing, the sound and violence of the sea, how different it was from a deep and quiet river though the same water flowed in both.

Merlin had clung to his hand and closed his eyes, and smiled, and when it was over Arthur had bent down again to kiss him: once on each eyelid and once more on Merlin's cracked, familiar lips. He had left, then. He had known he could not bear the laudatio or the nenia, could not bear to see the cold mask fitted over Merlin's face; could not bear to see Merlin taken so fully from him by the people's mourning. 

So he had left, and on the ninth day had poured wine into the earth as his own, private commemoration as he travelled, because there was no home for him without Merlin. Merlin had been his home, and, homeless, there was nothing left for him in Rome. There was nothing but to reclaim the home he had once had, and here he finds himself nearly arrived, straining his eyes in search of any familiar shore. The coin is heavy and damp in his hand, slipping a bit from how tightly he holds it. It is a match to the one he had left with Merlin, the coin he had slipped beneath Merlin's tongue, knowing Morgana would find and leave it as a fitting obol for Charon. 

He has no plans for the other side. The home which was his he knows must be gone, vanished with the years, but it will serve as a stopping place as good as any other. He has only to fill his days with wandering, perhaps find some small place to settle; he will bury the coin there, a place where Merlin's spirit might find him from time to time, that Merlin might see the forests he dreamed of. He must only wait until he, too, might cross the rivers—not salt water, like the foam which splashes up and over his cloak now—but as sweetly bitter as any medicine—and find his home.


End file.
